by Jim Tully
“The time is up,” shouted Old Hughie.
“Let him finish his tale. We must be courteous to the stranger within our gates,” said the bartender, “besides, Hughie—have compassion—this man has loved a woman.”
“Thank you—thank you profoundly,” bowed the man with one leg—“you are a greater philosopher than most men who wipe bars—
“The Sultan weighed six hundred and six pounds. His body was gray and blue like rubber. But he was twenty feet tall so he did not seem so heavy.
“‘Women love a tall man,’ he continued—‘if a tall man just remains quiet he will pass for Solomon with the smartest woman alive. The reason my realm is one of beauty and joy everlasting is because women do not think. They are told what to think in your nation—and what have you—more silly opinions—and less beauty.’
“He walked to a chart.
“‘When did your wife leave you?’ he asked.
“‘Three months ago,’ I replied.
“‘Then why this haste,’ he thought seriously for some moments. ‘It will be at least eleven months according to the most precise regulations of my women tabulators before I can even see her. Some very beautiful women have remained in my harem for as long as three years before they could even be admitted to my presence. Only four years ago I had to call in four kings from Christian Europe to help me give them audiences. So you see—sad man of love—that that which breaks your heart is but a dreary incident in the life of another man. All the troubles in the world, my sad man of love, are caused because men cannot lie still in bed.’ He turned swiftly from the chart.
“‘What were you doing in Turkey with your beautiful wife?’
“‘I was a missionary, Sire—and my wife worked with me in the saving of souls. Only three nights before she was captured for your harem she had saved forty of your heathen Turks. She was devout—and read her Bible each hour.’
“The Sultan raised his hand. ‘It’s no wonder she left—your Bible—I am told—does not bring peace to women. Only love can do that—and you denied it to her. No beautiful woman wishes to convert heathens. My long years as Sultan have taught me that. My men have searched the realms of the world for beautiful women. No beautiful woman was ever found among the lady missionaries. Saving souls is for ugly people with minds bitter as the thoughts of death. For what does it matter, my friend, how you walk to the grave—the test is always—what is important. Whether one be a scavenger of souls—or in love with a woman.’”
The stranger wept for a moment.
“But ah, she was lovely. Before we took ship for Turkey she converted a man in New York who said he was an alderman. She was alone with him in a room for several hours. And when they came out the man said he was saved. ‘Much can be done with prayer,’ the alderman said.
“She was being wrongfully detained by an evil woman in an evil house when I discovered her. After she, by the evil machinations of this evil woman, had stolen seven dollars from me I decided it was time to convert her and let her see the world.
“I used to teach women the way of virtue in such houses. It was a hard task.
“At last she consented to elope with me and save sinners if I gave her the seven dollars. And when we were married she told me of her sinful life. And, ah, gentlemen—she too had her Bull Run of the soul.
“I thought of her wrongs as I stood before the Sultan.
“‘Jump—’ I yelled, pulling a big gun from my pocket.
“The Sultan jumped out of the window. I watched him land on the pavement below. I turned from the window and started to leave the room.
“The Sultan had bounced back and stood before me.
“‘I have thought it all over,’ he said politely—‘I shall not chase you from my dominions. You are free to wander where you will. But still you will be in prison. For well I know that the man who takes one woman seriously will never be free. I bid you good morning.’ He pushed me out of his presence.”
“What became of the wife?” asked the whisky collector.
Before the man could answer he collapsed.
“I knew it,” smiled Old Hughie, “he talked himself under.”
“Well he’s just a travelin’ bum,” put in John Crasby.
“Indade, an’ he’s worse than that,” returned my grandfather, “he’s a beer drinker.”
He rubbed his chin—
“Now whin I was a pidler in the South—”
CHAPTER XV
DITCH DIGGERS
IN two weeks my father again came to St. Marys. He greeted me with no concern when he met me with my grandfather.
He had an old gray valise. It was shaped like a long box. Six heavy straps held it shut.
Empty bottles, corkscrews, a rusty beer can and several pipes were scattered about the room. An extra shirt, and an old necktie were in the bottom of a bureau drawer. He carried a very sharp razor with him. By some process known only to a near-sighted ditch digger, he managed to shave off every other whisker on his face.
Drunk or sober, he would shave each morning. When finished, his face resembled a red map of Ireland, dotted here and there with withered vegetation. He would lift his long red mustache and remove here and there the hair from the edge of his upper lip. This was no doubt done in order to give his mustache the proper swing downward. It gave him the appearance of a walrus.
My father contended with a group of ditch diggers in his room that desire for liquors always skipped a generation.
“How about you and Grandad?” I asked during a lull.
Father squinted at me with a puzzled smile. The ditch diggers laughed—
“The kid’s all right, Jim—who’d o’ thought o’ that?”
A hunchback mud thrower slapped me on the shoulders hard enough to knock me forward. “You slipped one under your old man’s belt that time.”
The men laughed at my father.
“Well,” he returned shaking the burning sensation of raw whisky from him, “a young fool can ask questions, a wise man can’t answer.”
My father always carried ten-cent paperbacked novels about with him.
Whether or not he had discrimination regarding their contents has always remained a mystery.
There were good and bad ditch-diggers in his opinion. Books he did not discuss.
Such authors as Charles Garvice, Bertha M. Clay, Balzac, Dumas, Daudet, Scott, Cooper, Dickens, Hardy, Zola, Hugo and “The Duchess” made up part of his travelling library at different times.
He liked books about women. I first read “Sappho,” “Camille,” “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” in my father’s paper-backed collection.
He once bought a collection of poetry in a paper cover.
He read a few lines and threw the book on the floor. He looked around for a drink. Finding none, he kicked the book under the bed and left the room.
I read all the books that father had. Among others were “Cousin Bette” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
I remembered the names of the authors. My father gave me fifty cents to buy more books. I bought “Pere Goriot,” “Paul and Virginia,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Les Miserables,” and “Germinal.”
At no time in my life has such passion been given to anything.
Goriot and Jean Valjean haunted me for months. Enraptured, I told the tale of the French bread thief to my father. He listened quietly.
“I’ve read it,” was all he said.
It was years before I could sense Hugo’s falseness to life. I have not read him since.
The preface to “Paul and Virginia” told me that Napoleon had asked the author, “When are you going to give us another ‘Paul and Virginia’?”
Zola made me mentally ill.
I took him too seriously.
Years later I discovered his romantic realism, and wondered why even as a child, he had fooled me.
My father read these books, and more, without comment.
He was busy with liquor an
d life. He may have felt that they were not worth discussion. I do not know. His comment on Pere Goriot’s daughters was—
“Women are that way.”
My sister came to the room on Sunday morning. Father sat near the window which faced Spring Street. He had a book in his hand and a bottle of whisky between his feet.
The church bells were ringing all over the town. Virginia looked about the room with sad eyes.
“I’ve come to take Jimmy to church,” she said to my father.
Our parent rose and splashed tobacco juice into a spittoon.
“All right,” he said indifferently, seating himself.
“But I don’t want to go, Virginia—I went every morning for six years—that’s enough,” I said.
My sister looked pleadingly at my father.
He caught the look, lifted his bottle, shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s up to the kid,” and took a long drink.
Virginia talked to me about my soul. She begged me with all the eloquence of seventeen.
My father paid no attention. Neither did I.
When she had finished I exclaimed—“I’ll never go again.”
I never did.
She stood in the center of the room and looked at me. She held a prayer book and rosary in her hand.
“I’ll say a prayer for you,” she said sadly.
“Say one for me while you’re at it,” said my father, rising and aiming at the spittoon again.
I could hear Virginia walking on the silent street below.
My father looked up from his book.
“Why did ye not go?” he asked.
“Because,” I replied.
He took a swig from the bottle and volunteered—
“It’s as good as anything else.”
My father outgrew many things. He remained a Democrat.
He was a passionate admirer of Grover Cleveland. So was Grandad Tully.
I remember hearing them talk of an incident in Cleveland’s life. When it was learned that Cleveland was the father of a bastard child, his friends and others were alarmed.
“What will we do about it?” they asked.
“Print it,” replied Cleveland.
Old Hughie Tully took a silver dollar of my father’s money which lay on the bar.
He spoke to the bartender, saying: “Here’s some idle money—let’s drink.”
My grandfather was irate.
“The veery ideah—of any man peerin’ into the great Cleveland’s bizness wit’ a woman,” he became more angry. He hit the bar.
“The very nerve of it—why I’d vote for Cleveland now if he had more bastards than the King of Ingland.”
“And the old boy likes his drink too,” put in the bartender.
“Shure—an’ why wouldn’t he,” exclaimed Old Hughie—he’s a MAN … God love the big belly of him, an’ the big brain—he’s the bist dimmycrat of thim all.”
To tease Old Hughie, a drinker at the bar chanted:
“The boat is coming around the bend,
Goodbye old Grover, goodbye—
’Tis loaded down with Harrison bend—
Goodbye old Grover, goodbye.”
Old Hughie drank feverishly and shouted—
“Do ye hear the words comin’ outta the empty head—the wind’s blowin’ inside it—”
My father had given much thought to the wiles of women. He said to me a few months after I had left the orphanage, “They’re all alike—some man can get ’em all.”
We were in his bedroom above the pool room. Two bottles of “gunshot” whisky were near his pillow.
Save for a red flannel shirt, wide open, he was naked as truth.
I groped for his meaning.
His long arms, his rope-muscled legs, his immense chest were covered with hair.
“Your mother,” he said, “would o’ fell too—they’re all alike.”
He was restless that Sunday night. The saloons were closed.
He interspersed talk with the rattling of liquor down a heavy throat.
He never followed a drink of whisky with water. He mixed nothing with raw liquor.
“No use spoilin’ it,” he said often.
Late into the night he told me of what he had learned about life and women.
Early next morning his ditch-digging friends called on him.
“This your youngest boy, Jim?” one of them asked.
“Sure,” said my father indifferently.
The delvers into mud felt my arms and shoulders.
They laughed heartily.
“He’s a husky kid.”
“Ain’t you gonna buy a drink, Jim?”
“Sure thing,” replied my father.
He reached into a bureau drawer for a rusty tin bucket. He took a bacon rind and greased the bottom and sides.
“That’s the stuff,” said one of my father’s friends. “It’ll make the beer fall flat and stick like lead—we’ll git twice as much.”
“An’ sure—don’t I know it,” retorted my father.
“Here son,” he said, “Go down to Oland’s on the corner and tell ’em your dad sent ye for a can of beer—twenty cents’ worth.”
I took the bucket and two dimes.
I asked the bartender for a dime’s worth of beer.
I watched him hold the bucket as far from the brass faucet as possible to make more foam in the bucket.
Before returning to my father I put water in the beer.
The men drank with wry faces. “It’s damned weak,” they agreed.
My father sent another ditch digger after the next bucket of beer.
Later in the day he said to me, “Kid—never spoil a bucket o’ beer for a nickel or a dime.”
He frowned.
“I once knew of an Irishman who drank water—his stomick got rusty an’ he died. But he niver mixed it with beer.”
There was in my father but one touch of ego. When drunk, which was often as convenience and chance would allow, he would bet money that he could throw a shovelful of dirt further than any man in Ohio.
And once, at an Irish picnic, he included the whole world.
A rival ditch digger heard him announce his claim to fame. He was from a German settlement at the other end of Auglaize County.
“You couldn’t throw dirt over a Protestant’s grave,” he shouted.
The saloon was full of men and the odor of frying fish. Above the noise could be heard the bragging of the rival diggers of ditches. It ended with both men placing a bet of ten dollars each in the hands of John Crasby and my grandfather’s bosom friend.
A site was selected where a large creek was being dug with the aid of horses and scrapers. My father rode with the German. Two drunken generals surveying a muddy country could not have looked more important. A score of men followed. Shovels were procured. As both men were right-handed it was decided to throw the dirt on the right side of the creek. Two men were to mark the spot where the largest portion of the dirt landed.
It was a drizzly day.
Each man was allowed ten minutes’ practice. The German stood in the bottom of the creek, the banks of which were far above his head. He threw the dirt with such speed that it hummed through the air. My father merely threw the dirt a short distance.
When the time was up each man stripped for action.
They stood, bare to the waist, in the drizzling weather.
Gum boots reached to their hips. There was shouting and laughter from the men on the bank.
When it was discovered that my father had beaten the German by three feet, the rival ditchers returned arm-in-arm to the saloon.
John Crasby, the holder of stakes, was nowhere to be found. He was at last discovered with Old Hughie in the Horseshoe Saloon.
They had spent the money for drink.
CHAPTER XVI
THE MERMAID AND THE WHALE
WITH his valise across his back, peddler fashion, my father walked away.
Our parting was casual.
&n
bsp; My loneliness was intense, my heart bitter. I said no word.
My father left me his small library of paperbacked novels. I was working in a combination saloon and restaurant.
I stood in back of the lunch counter, sleeves rolled to my elbows, a greasy apron tied about me. The dish sink was so near the street that people could see me as they passed.
There soon took root in my heart the false weed of humility, which often conquered pride.
It was apparent to the rustic drunkards and glib salesmen, who teased me as a result.
The owner of the restaurant joined in the merriment with his customers.
The teasing made life weigh more heavily upon me. I was often ashamed to go on the street when the day’s work had ended. Instead, I would go to my little room and read—with my world in upheaval.
One evening a young farmer who did not like the Lawlers became personal.
When my grandfather came, I threw my childish pride away and broke down in his arms. He caressed me roughly, and said—
“Take yere own part, me boy—if ye let thim kick ye at yere age—ye’ll niver do nothin’ but crawl the rist o’ yere life.”